


Following Suit

by Cherepashka



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Absurd quantities of coffee, Angst, Auror Potter, Cursebreaking, Draco Malfoy's sneaky shenanigans, EWE, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Mentions of Canonical Character Death, Mild Sexual Content, No really they're atrocious, Not Cursed Child-compliant, Not Epilogue-Compliant, Not Pottermore-compliant, Questionable law enforcement practices, Questionable legal ethics, Questionable romantic choices, Terrible lawyer puns, The author disclaims liability for ensuing groans, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, You Have Been Warned, mentions of past trauma, questionable decisions all around, with a happy ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-05 18:08:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19045672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cherepashka/pseuds/Cherepashka
Summary: Draco sues the Auror Office for false arrest. Harry gets tasked with handling the lawsuit on behalf of the office. This goes approximately as well as one would expect.





	Following Suit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nefariousk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nefariousk/gifts).



> This is a gift for lovely human nefariousk, who has blown through so many life and career milestones in the last few months and deserves major congratulations. You are incredible and inspiring and wonderful, and I love you!

Harry stared at the Daily Prophet headline, the beginnings of a migraine throbbing behind his eye sockets.

_Prominent St. Mungo’s Donor Sues Department of Magical Law Enforcement for False Arrest_

He closed his eyes, hoping that both headline and migraine would go away, but when he opened them again the words remained stubbornly on the page.

The migraine intensified.

He’d known, when he accepted the assignment to track a smuggling operation for Dark objects to their fence in Cyprus, that he’d be returning to a mountain of paperwork. It would be unpleasant, certainly, but paperwork he could handle. Paperwork, he had mentally prepared for. 

Paperwork _and_ a lawsuit just seemed unfair. 

Something like this had to happen sooner or later, he supposed, given the number of arrests the Auror Office had made in the fallout from war, but Merlin’s beard, why did sooner or later have to be _now_? He’d bet his Firebolt the arrestee was some former Death Eater who’d managed to squirm out of the trials with the family fortune intact—certainly there were far too many of those still around—and who was now complaining about being made to sit in a separate room while whatever Dark artifact they’d been illegally hoarding was confiscated. But leave it to the Prophet to call them a ‘prominent donor’ when it had labeled _him_ ‘troubled’, ‘attention-seeking’, and, most recently, ‘the Auror Office’s most dubious promotion’.

Well, if he was lucky, at least the Auror responsible for the arrest would be on someone else’s team, and all this would be someone else’s problem.

That faint hope lasted a glorious seven seconds, all the way through the end of the lede, until he saw the next line and nearly upended his coffee into the precarious stack of unfinished reports on his desk. It wasn’t, he realized, a problem of who was getting sued. It was a problem of who was doing the suing.

_Plaintiff Draco Malfoy claims…_

That sniveling git! Of course he would be behind this. Harry was tempted to track him down right then and punch his pointy little face in—and very well might have done, if it weren’t for the headline he knew they would make out of that:

 _Rumours of New Deputy Head Auror’s Instability Confirmed in Explosive Assault on Distinguished Citizen_

The migraine erupted against the inside of his skull with all the incandescent glee of a case of Weasleys’ Wildfire Whiz-bangs.

Harry put his face in his hands and groaned.

§

“Sir, are you sure?” he found himself saying carefully, a short while and a tall beaker of De-stressing Draught later. He kept a wary eye on Kingsley Shacklebolt’s nose. The Chief Auror, acting Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and widely-favoured choice for next Minister of Magic was famed for the stony stoicism he maintained in the face of his employees’ best efforts to crack the façade, but Harry had figured out that his nostrils would flare, just the slightest bit, when he was hiding the sort of irritation that heralded some hapless Auror getting four weeks’ traffic duty or clean-up on the latest round of exploding toilets.

“Quite sure, Potter,” Shacklebolt said firmly. No sign of nostril movement. Harry pressed on.

“It’s just, I’m not certain I’m the best person for this particular assignment, sir. I, er, I haven’t always had the best relationship with the reporters at the Prophet. And Ma— the plaintiff, I mean, well, he and I don’t tend to get along.” 

This was, he felt, an admirably diplomatic way of saying that Draco Malfoy had always been a bully, a git, and, oh yes, an _actual Death Eater_ right up until the moment Harry had saved his cowardly hide. There was also the time Harry had, with rather less moral high ground, almost accidentally murdered him; though he’d seen worse since, the memory of Malfoy’s blood spreading across the floor of the sixth-floor boys’ bathroom still made his stomach churn with sick guilt when he thought about it too hard. 

Still, it was another tally in the ‘Don’t Give This Assignment to Harry Potter’ column. For the moment, and pretty much for the rest of his life if he was honest, Harry wanted nothing more than to avoid seeing, speaking with, or even thinking about Malfoy. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask, especially since Malfoy seemed to harbor similar sentiments toward him; during the seven years since the Death Eater trials, Malfoy had conspicuously avoided any events where Harry was expected to show up. 

True, his decision to bring a lawsuit directly against Harry’s office might be considered a reversal of the trend, but Harry had plenty of colleagues who could handle this case whose history with Malfoy was not marked by years of mutual and frequently violent loathing. 

_You mean obsession,_ said a voice in his mind that sounded uncannily like Hermione. 

He told it firmly to shut up. 

“Perhaps Robins, or—”

Shacklebolt’s right nostril twitched. “Auror Robins is skilled, competent, and quick to learn. She is not, however, my Deputy. No, Potter, as a representative of this office and my second-in-command, you are very much the person for this assignment. I’m aware of the relevant parts of your and Mr. Malfoy’s history. That is exactly why your finding a satisfactory resolution to his grievance will be so helpful. It would go a long way toward defusing the sort of tension that impedes the work we’ve been trying to do.”

That sounded far too much like politics for Harry’s taste, not to mention that he put his chances of achieving a ‘satisfactory resolution’ to anything involving Malfoy at roughly equal to his chances of spontaneously sprouting wings and a beak. If only either of those objections was likely to carry any weight with his Head of Department.

“But this is a civil issue, and I don’t really have the background in Magical Law that I’d need to—”

“Consider this your opportunity to learn. The Auror Office does get complaints of this sort from time to time, as much as our training and practice standards aim to prevent them. You ought to know how to deal with them.” The left nostril was twitching now too, ever so slightly. Harry ignored it in favour of one last desperate attempt to escape.

“Absolutely, sir, it’s only that I’ve got rather a lot on my plate at the moment since I’ve just got back, you know, reports to finish and— ”

Both nostrils immediately flared to their widest extent. “When, Auror Potter, you submit even a single report that is both on time and legible, then, and only then, will I believe your concern for the landslide of documents you call an in-tray to be sincere.”

Harry winced. If Ron were still his case partner, he’d have told Harry to cut his losses and count himself lucky that Shacklebolt hadn’t saddled him with exploding toilet duty on top of the Malfoy mess—but Ron had quit the Aurors over a year ago. Stifling a sigh, Harry got up to leave. 

His hand was on the doorknob when Shacklebolt spoke again.

“Potter.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I’m not doing this to punish you, whatever you might think. I am doing this because we both know that, one way or another, I’ll be out of this job within a year or two.”

“Sir, you don’t—”

“I want to know that my successor will be up to the task of running the office. That means all of it, press and legal and civilian complaints as well as the actual solving of crimes.”

Harry stilled, feeling at once unexpectedly warmed and as though a bucket of ice water had been upended over his head. “Your… successor, sir?”

The nostrils subsided. If Harry didn’t know better, he’d almost think that was a hint of a smile on Kingsley Shacklebolt’s face. “Yes, Potter, my successor. Someone who understands and believes in the reforms we’ve been trying to make in this office, and in this entire department, and who has the tenacity to carry them through. But that person would, of course, need to have the trust not only of the Aurors but of the public as well.”

“Right, sir.” He stood up a bit straighter. “I won’t let you down.”

“Good.”

He bent over the next report on his desk in a clear dismissal, but as Harry turned back to the door he caught, out of the corner of his eye, the briefest glimpse of the expression on Shacklebolt’s face.

Definitely a smile.

§

False arrest, it turned out, was only the first of many grievances Malfoy raised in his complaint, which had mysteriously made its way to Harry’s desk during his meeting with Shacklebolt. Trespass on private grounds, illegal entry, excessive force, improper retaliation, unjustified civil asset forfeiture.... Harry flipped through to the end of the complaint, discovered the hefty stack of exhibits that lay beneath it, groaned, flipped back to the beginning, and struggled through six pages of ‘wherefore’s and ‘herein’s and ‘as alleged _supra_ ’s before giving it up as a lost cause. Maybe he’d be better off starting with the Auror’s arrest report. It would probably be equally incoherent, but at least Auror reports were a familiar incoherence. Shoving himself back from his desk, he stood, cracked his neck, and made his way over to Records.

His heart sank when he saw that the person on duty at the Records desk was Dennis Creevey, who looked up as Harry came in and greeted him with a small smile.

“Hi, Harry.”

“Hi, Dennis.” 

It wasn’t that he disliked Dennis, who’d joined the Aurors six months ago. Still in training, he was one of the department’s hardest-working new recruits, and certainly the only one who who seemed as excited to be assigned to the Records desk as he was to shadow experienced Aurors in the field. But Harry couldn’t look at him without seeing Colin, Colin as he’d been at the end, eyes vacant and looking terribly small for his sixteen years and so, so still, and _why_ hadn’t anyone stopped him sneaking back into a battle that would kill him? For all that Dennis was always perfectly friendly to Harry, being around him brought a burning knot of guilt to the pit of Harry’s stomach. And as hard as he found it to face Dennis’s enthusiasm, what was worse was seeing it falter when Dennis thought no one was looking, giving way to a grimness that looked nearly as out of place on his face as death had looked on his brother’s. He hadn’t mentioned Voldemort, or the Battle of Hogwarts, or his brother since joining the Aurors. Nor had he said anything to suggest he blamed Harry or hated him or wished he hadn’t gotten Colin killed. 

Harry didn’t need him to. 

“Looking for anything in particular?” 

Startled, Harry swallowed and replied, “Oh, er, yeah, I was just picking up the arrest report for Draco Malfoy—you don’t have to do that, I can find it myself.” But Dennis had already leapt from his chair and darted to a filing cabinet.

“That’s all right, Harry, I’ve got it right here.” He passed over a slim file. “Cormac McLaggen was the one who made the arrest.”

Harry, who had been avoiding Dennis’s eyes, looked up sharply. “McLaggen?” Dennis nodded. 

Wonderful. 

Harry had thought himself well rid of his former Quidditch teammate after he’d left school, but that only lasted until McLaggen turned up for his Auror qualifications barely a year after Harry had passed his. Harry had done his best to avoid him since then. It had turned out to be easier than he feared, as he spent most of his time in the field, in the training rooms, or at his desk, while McLaggen seemed to spend most of his time regaling the break room with tales of his own heroic exploits. By some small mercy Harry had only had to work two actual cases with him—though maybe that was less mercy than the fact that their second case had ended with him having to Stun McLaggen to prevent him from collapsing a warehouse over not only their suspect but also the dozens of magical creatures he’d been illegally breeding, not to mention the two other Aurors on their team. Stunning your own colleague, it turned out, was a good way to earn an internal investigation; and shouting at the investigation committee about how the Stunned colleague should never have been hired in the first place was a good way to earn a suspension. Harry staunchly insisted he’d been driven to it. 

“Not everyone who becomes an Auror does it for the right reasons,” Hermione had told him sagely at the time. Ron, who was slowly coming to grips with the realization that he was not, in fact, particularly good at being an Auror, had flushed tomato-red, but Hermione patted his arm absently and went on, “There are plenty of people who join because they were bullies at school and want to keep on being bullies, only with the authority of the Ministry behind them.” Harry had thought this an unfair criticism as far as most of his colleagues went, but in McLaggen’s case he had to concede it was spot-on. 

It would be the height of unprofessionalism, he told himself, to malign another Auror in front of a trainee. “Right. Thanks, Dennis.”

He made to leave, but Dennis leaned forward conspiratorially. “I heard Draco Malfoy’s suing over the arrest,” he said, in tones suggesting this was a crucial bit of intelligence from a highly protected confidential source rather than the front-page headline on the morning’s Prophet.

Harry sighed. “Yeah.” 

“Are you working on the case? Isn’t that going to complicate things, having a lawsuit going while we investigate him?”

“Er, probably.” Shacklebolt hadn’t made it sound like there was anything further to investigate, apart from the lawsuit, but Harry wouldn’t be surprised if Malfoy _had_ been up to something illicit. Perhaps this whole horrible assignment might not be completely useless if he could catch Malfoy at something. But no, that was a dangerous way to go into a case, starting by assuming a crime had been committed and looking for evidence to back it up, and besides, Shacklebolt was counting on him.

“I could help, if you wanted,” Dennis offered. “We just finished our coursework on de-escalation and civilian complaints, so it’d be good practice—”

“Thanks, Dennis, I can handle it,” Harry mumbled, and fled, the file clutched to his chest and Dennis’s ‘Really, it’d be no trouble at all!’ echoing after him down the hallway.

Back in his office, he shoved the complaint and stack of exhibits to one side, slumped into his chair, and got to work on the arrest file. The beginning of McLaggen’s report was straightforward enough: two days before Harry’s return from Cyprus, the Auror Office had gotten a tip that Malfoy was preparing to sell a variety of Dark objects from his family’s collection on the black market. Based on that, McLaggen had gotten a warrant to confiscate anything illegal. He and Kowalski had gone to Malfoy Manor to conduct the search, collected a number of items that were clearly banned from private possession, and, predictably given that this was McLaggen, moved on to the stuff that was probably legal but just suspicious enough to be plausibly seized. Malfoy had ‘escalated the situation’— _Though I bet McLaggen built him the stairs,_ Harry thought—and had eventually 'gotten belligerent’ when the Aurors took an inkstand and sheaf of blank parchment from his grandfather’s writing-desk.

Harry blinked.

Why would Malfoy’s breaking point be a pile of blank parchment? Come to that, why would McLaggen and Kowalski bother to take it? Granted, even parchment could hold secrets—the Marauder’s Map came to mind—but this seemed more like McLaggen goading a suspect and Malfoy being too much of a prat not to take the bait.

A knock at his door interrupted his thoughts.

“That the Malfoy lawsuit?” Demelza Robins asked, nodding at the pile of papers he’d shoved aside to make space for McLaggen’s report. 

Harry grimaced. “Yeah.” 

“Ouch,” she said sympathetically, and Harry attempted to arrange his face into the expression of a Deputy Head Auror who was pleased to take a break from a distasteful assignment to assist one of his most promising junior colleagues, and not that of a Deputy Head who had recently tried to foist off on that same junior colleague the exact assignment she was interrupting. “About that, though, the boss sent me to let you know Malfoy’s solicitor wants a meeting tomorrow morning. To,” she scrunched up her face and dropped into an imitation of Shacklebolt’s much deeper voice, “assess whether it might be possible to negotiate a mutually acceptable resolution.”

Tomorrow morning? Harry glanced back down at McLaggen’s file, which was fairly thin, and then at the much, much thicker pile of Malfoy’s complaint and exhibits, and then at the files strewn around his office for all his _other_ open cases, cases he’d gotten behind on while away, cases with actual people in actual danger, and leads that might go cold, and Dark wizards who needed to be caught. 

Catching the direction of his glances, Demelza offered, “Someone from Legal on our end will be there to help with all the technical bits. Maybe it’ll all get sorted quickly, right?”

“Yeah,” Harry sighed. “Maybe. Thanks, Demelza.”

“Cheers.” She strode off down the hallway, and Harry turned back to the report. It looked like it was going to be a long night.

§

“Leave some for the rest of us, why don’t you?” Sally-Anne Perks said the next morning, eyeing his coffee mug as she went to get her own. De-Stressing Draught and Pepper-up Potion were all well and good, but for flavour, ease of brewing, and aroma, plain old unmagical coffee was still most Aurors’ top choice.

“Shut it,” he answered, without any real rancor. For all she’d been in Slytherin, Perks had never been part of the Voldemort-sympathizer crowd in school; as far as he knew, she’d gone into hiding during what was supposed to be their seventh year at school. He’d been a bit surprised when she joined the Aurors, but they got on well enough at work. Quiet, meticulous, and with a knack for spotting possibilities others had missed, she’d developed formidable skill at tracing magical signatures from physical evidence.

“Late night? You don’t usually look this wrecked after stakeout. Hot date or something?”

“Ha.” He hadn’t dated since… well, since Ginny, really, because whatever he and Anthony had been doing couldn’t really be called _dating_ —though it had led to its fair share of sleepless nights. It had been over a year since then, but Perks’s teasing still brought a blush to his face. Thankfully his skin was dark enough not to show it. “No, I was here. Working.”

“That’s right, you’ve got the Malfoy complaint.” She paused. “Look, I know you didn’t get on with him in school”—Harry choked at the magnitude of that understatement, nearly scalding his windpipe—”and I’m not saying he didn’t swan about plenty with his own House either… but something about this feels off.”

“What d’you mean, off?”

She ran a hand through her mass of dark braids. “Malfoys don’t just sell off family heirlooms in batches. Something weird’s going on if that’s really what Draco was doing. And, well, do we know who sent in the tip about him?”

Harry thought back to the report he’d read the previous day. “No,” he said slowly. “It was anonymous. McLaggen didn’t bother to follow it up before getting authorization to search Malfoy Manor.”

Perks rolled her eyes. “Which no magistrate except Selwyn would’ve signed off on anyway, with that little to go on.”

“Wait, you’re not actually suggesting Malfoy has a point, are you?”

She flashed him a grin. “All I’m suggesting is maybe there’s something more going on. Besides, we can’t keep letting McLaggen get away with the sort of rubbish he pulls.”

Harry sighed. Caught between McLaggen and Malfoy. Hardly how he’d envisioned his dream job. Morosely, he took another swig of coffee just as his watch, a gift from Andromeda Tonks, chimed. “Oh damn, I’m late. I’ve got a meeting with Malfoy’s solicitor now, actually.”

“Go on, then. Good luck, I suppose. Oh, and when you’re done, I’ve got the results on the potion residue from the Jayawardena case.”

He nodded. “I’ll take a look when I’m back.” Downing the rest of his coffee in three large swallows, he rushed to his office to grab the files he’d read through the previous night, then made his way to the tiny conference room he’d reserved. 

He crashed through the door and stopped short. The room already had an occupant, a man about Harry’s age dressed in sweeping burgundy robes covered with intricate geometric designs embroidered in metallic thread. He was tilted back in his chair, inspecting his nails—which, Harry saw, were painted the same dark red as his robes, except for the ring fingers, which had been done in gold. 

“Er, sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong room. This one’s staff-only and it’s been booked for a meeting—wait, _Zabini_?”

The man flicked an invisible speck of dust from his thumbnail and looked up, and yes, that was definitely Blaise Zabini, though Harry didn’t recall him ever dressing quite this extravagantly in school. He appeared to be wearing gold eyeshadow as well, Harry noticed, with a faint sense of alarm. “ _Potter_? Oh, Herpo help me, don’t tell me they’ve given _you_ settlement authority.” 

“Sorry, what?” 

“I’m aware this room’s been booked for a meeting, Potter. It’s my meeting.”

“What?” said Harry again.

Zabini lifted an elegant eyebrow. “Do keep up. I’m Draco’s solicitor.”

Harry became aware that his mouth was hanging slightly open, and closed it. Warily he sat down across from Zabini, who pulled out a pad of yellowing parchment and a raven-feather quill. He flicked the quill twice with one shiny nail and balanced it, point-down, on the parchment. Harry found himself unpleasantly reminded of his interviews with Rita Skeeter. 

“Where’s Malfoy, then?” he demanded.

“No reason to bother him with preliminary negotiations like this one. That’s what people hire solicitors for. Now, I must start out by letting you know that you’re in a very difficult position here, as I’m sure you realize,” Zabini said briskly, shaking out his sleeves, which made the embroidered patterns ripple nauseatingly, and steepling his fingers. “Your Aurors’ treatment of Mr. Malfoy was disproportionate, abusive, and totally unjustified. Your office is facing a major publicity scandal. My client is entitled not only to the return of property that was inappropriately seized but also to damages for the pain and suffering he endured. And the best part is you’re personally on the hook, Potter. _Respondeat superior_.” 

Harry waited, tense. Nothing happened. He raised an eyebrow. “Trying to scare me, Zabini? That’s not even a real spell.”

Zabini’s sneer could have shriveled dragonhide. “It’s not a spell, you dolt, it’s a legal doctrine. One that means, thanks to the efforts of your bumbling subordinates, that you’re going to owe Mr. Malfoy a truly atrocious number of Galleons.”

“Hang on,” said Harry hotly, setting aside Zabini’s fake spell (and possibly real legal doctrine) for later, when he could ask Hermione about it, “you don’t think a former Death Eater pawning off Dark artifacts would be scandal too? Malfoy was being investigated for selling Dark contraband!” On the basis of a single tip of unknown and dubious origin, yes, but he needn't mention that to Zabini. 

“Naturally Mr. Malfoy asserts that any disposition he might have been planning to make of his private property was within his rights and perfectly legal. There are plenty of people who would agree. It’s really quite outrageous, the way you’ve been cooking up the slightest pretexts to persecute anyone who’s even suspected of having ties to… the organization you mentioned.”

Harry glared at him, outraged. “We haven’t been persecuting anyone,” he spat. “And these are Death Eaters we’re talking about. Followers of _Voldemort_! They weren’t just some ‘organization’, it’s not like we’re investigating people who used to be members of a—a society for training therapy Crups for kids with dragonpox.”

Zabini glanced briefly down at his parchment, where the raven-feather quill was furiously scribbling, and smiled. _Admits to office policy behind pattern and practice of targeting individuals with suspected Death Eater ties_ , Harry read, upside-down. 

“That’s not what I said!” 

“No?” The quill moved on to the next line and continued scribbling. The new trail of upside-down letters said: _Blatant inconsistencies in responses to questioning._ Harry clenched his teeth.

“And Malfoy’s got a hell of a lot more than ‘suspected’ ties to the Death Eaters. He _took the Dark Mark_.” And then spent a year fearing that Voldemort would murder his parents if he failed, and breaking down in bathrooms where anyone could come along and cut him open with a spell they hadn’t tested…. 

Harry shoved that thought aside. 

“So sorry I’m late,” came a voice from the door. Harry and Zabini both looked up as Penelope Clearwater walked in. Harry had only known her in school as Percy Weasley’s girlfriend and one of the temporarily Petrified basilisk victims, but after graduating she’d gone on to extended studies in Magical Law and joined the Department of Magical Law Enforcement’s Legal Office. Harry’s job rarely required him to work closely with Legal, but Penelope had walked him through the proceedings the first time he’d had to testify before the Wizengamot in his professional capacity. 

Seeing him now, she stopped abruptly, then directed a cold stare at Zabini, who nodded graciously. Harry noticed that he’d somehow whisked the raven-feather quill and parchment out of sight. “Not at all, Ms. Clearwater. Potter and I were just having a most… productive conversation.”

Penelope’s eyes narrowed. 

“Mr. Zabini, might I have a word with Auror Potter? Alone?” The last word dripped ice.

Without waiting for a response she grabbed Harry’s elbow and yanked him upright, and despite her being about half a head shorter than him, he found himself being dragged back into the corridor. It was a bit like being towed by a tiny and very insistent tugboat. As soon as the door closed behind them, she planted him firmly against the wall and whirled to face him. “Listen, Harry, I know you’re not stupid. You’re an Auror, for Circe’s sake. You’ve done interrogations, haven’t you?”

“Course I have.”.

“Tell me, when you’re doing them, do you like it when the wizards you’re questioning insist on having their lawyers present?”

“Of course not,” Harry replied, taken aback. Usually only the richest and slimiest of his arrestees had solicitors on call anyway, and summoning them always led to the sort of interrogation that made him want to bang his head against a wall, since he’d probably get better information from the wall anyhow. “Lawyers always just tell them to shut up and—oh.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ll, er, I’ll just let you handle Zabini then, shall I?”

“ _Thank_ you.”

Feeling sheepish, he followed her back into the meeting room, where she was now directing all of her hundred-and-ten pounds of curly-haired Ravenclaw wrath at Zabini. “If I find you’ve been speaking to Auror Potter, or anyone in this office involved in this case, outside of my presence again, Mr. Zabini, I shall personally ensure you are brought before the Wizengamot for misconduct unbecoming your profession. And don’t think I didn’t notice you were using a Deposition Dicta-quill, despite the fact that you haven’t filed a single deposition notice, and requested this meeting for _confidential settlement negotiations_.” Her voice was frosty, her gaze knife-like. Personally, Harry found the effect terrifying. 

If Zabini was at all frightened, though, he didn’t show it. “Then let’s get negotiating, shall we?”

Two hours later, Harry saw Zabini out of the conference room with a profound sense of relief to see the burgundy-draped back of him, and turned to Penelope with a sigh. 

“Well,” she said, “for all of Zabini’s posturing, it honestly seems like Malfoy’s more upset about the things we seized than any of the rest of it.” Harry privately thought that, based on the complaint he’d read and what Zabini had said, Malfoy was plenty upset about the ‘pain and suffering’ he had evidently endured during his encounter with the Aurors and ensuing night in a holding cell; Zabini had described those in terms better suited to a history of medieval torture rites. But then Harry had only really followed about two-thirds of the negotiation. “I think he could be convinced to drop the suit entirely,” Penelope went on, thoughtfully, “if he got enough of them back.” 

Harry frowned. “If any of it is illegal Dark stuff, though…”

“Well, yes. But you might as well start by looking through the items. If any of them are harmless, we can begin with those and see what he’d be willing to settle for.”

“All right.” First, though, more coffee was in order. He started for the break room, passing the door to the Auror Office’s lobby on the way. Suddenly he paused, purely on instinct. Something had caught his eye. 

Scanning the small crowd of Aurors returning or leaving, and civilians waiting to request assistance or report an incident, he was just in time to see the main door swing shut behind a departing figure with dark robes and pale hair. 

Harry frowned. 

If Malfoy had specifically sent Zabini to handle the negotiation meeting so he didn’t have to be there in person, then what had he been doing at the Auror Office?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the terrible lawyer puns seem heavily tilted toward the US system and Anglo-American common law, which may seem incongruous for magical Britain, that's because I currently lack the bandwidth for extensive research into jurisdictions I'm not already familiar with.

**Author's Note:**

> Planned update schedule is once a week, but there are a few weeks over the next few months when I'll be traveling, which may delay some updates. Feedback is welcome! Oh, and I'm now (very sporadically) on tumblr at cherepashkadrabbles.


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